A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [77]
She lifted her head, forced back the tears. “Do you dream of the corpses you’ve seen?”
Taken aback, he said before he thought, “Sometimes.”
“I dreamed about my parents after they died. But I was too young to know what death was. I saw them as shining angels floating about heaven and watching me to see if I was good. In fact, the first time I saw the Venus above the hall here at Mallows, I thought it was my mother. It was a great comfort, oddly enough.” After a moment she said in a different voice, “You’ll have to chase your straws without me. I’m sorry. There’s nothing else I can do.”
This time he knew he had to go. He stood up. “I’d like to question your staff again before I leave. Will you tell Johnston that I have your permission?”
“Question them, then. Just put an end to this.” It was a plea; her anger had drained away into pain and something else that he couldn’t quite identify.
And so he spent the next hour talking to the servants, but his mind was on the lonely woman shut up in grief a few walls, a few doors from wherever he went in that house.
Mary Satterthwaite nervously told him she wasn’t sure what the master and the Captain were arguing about, but Miss Wood had said they were discussing the wedding, and it appeared to have given her the headache; she wanted only to go to bed and be left alone.
“Was it common for the Colonel and the Captain to argue?”
“Oh, no sir! They never did, except over a horse race or how a battle was fought, or the like. Men often quarrel rather than admit they’re wrong, you know.”
He smiled. “And who was wrong in this instance? The Colonel? The Captain?”
Mary frowned, taking him seriously. “I don’t know, sir.” She added reluctantly, “I’d guess, sir, it was the Colonel.”
“Why?”
“He threw his glass at the door. I mean, he couldn’t throw it at the Captain, being as he was already gone. But he didn’t like it that the Captain had had the last word, so to speak. So he threw his glass. As if there was still anger in him, or guilt, or frustration. Men don’t like to be wrong, sir. And I doubt if the Colonel was, very often.”
Which was a very perceptive observation. He asked about relations between the Captain and the Colonel. Cordial, he was told. Two quite different men, but they respected each other.
In the end, he asked to be taken upstairs to any rooms overlooking the hillside where the Colonel had been riding.
In theory, the hill was in view from a number of windows, both in the family quarters and on the servants’ floor. At this time of year, with the trees fully leafed out, it was different. You’d have to be lucky, Rutledge thought, peering out from one of the maids’ windows—the best of the lot—to catch a glimpse from here. You’d have to know where the Colonel was riding, and be watching for the faintest flicker of movement, and then not be certain what you’d seen was a horse and man. Possible, then. But not likely.
Tired, with Hamish grumbling in the back of his mind, Rutledge left the house and began the walk back to the meadow, the far hedge, and the lane where he’d left his car two hours or more before.
He glimpsed Maggie, the quiet Sommers cousin, hanging out a tablecloth on the line. He waved to her, but she didn’t see him, the breast-high wall and the climbing roses blocking her view. He walked on. Somewhere behind her he could hear the goose honking irritably, as if it had been shut away for the morning and was not happy about it. Rutledge smiled. Served the damned bird right!
Back in the meadow where Charles Harris had been found, Rutledge ignored Hamish and began to quarter the land carefully. But there was nothing to be learned. Nothing that was out of the ordinary. Nothing of interest. He went back over the land again, moving patiently, his eyes on the ground, his mind concentrating on every blade of grass, every inch of soil. Then he moved into the copse where the killer might have stood waiting.
Still nothing. Frustrated,